Posts by Defrag

A million? Nope. BF2 had 7 and they all got played. The only ones that didn't get as much playtime were spec ops (after C4 chucking was nerfed, it became too niche) and assault (after the n00b tube was nerfed, there was no real reason to play assault over medic)). I'm fine with some consolidation, I just dislike it when there's a million different unlock combinations and loads of the guns are interchangeable across classes. Not a fan of the vehicle specialisations, either. I'd much rather everything was clearer cut and you know what you're facing.

Quote from Erratic

Everything else doesn't apply because it's the old argument that boils down to basically 'BC2 is not BF2, so here's why it's worse'. It's a condensed infantry focused version of the Battlefield formula with destruction. It's not about taking a buggy and driving for 3 minutes to flank. That shit's awesome but it's not BC2.

I don't think it's irrelevant because they're two different flavours of the battlefield franchise and so comparable; BF3 can either go more towards BF2 with bells on, or towards BC2. I'm arguing the point as to why I think one is more fun than the other. It's just an opinion.

My hunch is that BF3 will be somewhere between the two, but with BC2's class system and infantry style (which I dislike).

Quote from PogoP

Oh yeah, TV missile was awesome in BF2. We used to pretend it was an actual TV show and said 'Thanks for watching TV Missile!' every time we fired a missile... Haha.

Haha, good stuff. I used to like TVing snipers in the face from about 10 feet away.

I think that's a fair point about the solidity of combat (BF2's infantry felt a bit floaty), but I still preferred the style of play. I'm just not a fan of games with extremely accurate guns that kill at all ranges.

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How was the gameplay more nuanced and expansive in BF2

It was mainly down to the 64 player maps + extra vehicles, plus the gun handling in BF2 was more challenging to learn due to the much more pronounced bullet drop & bullet travel time. In BC2 it's basically just "aim gun directly at dude who is 20 miles away, fire gun until dead, repeat". This part is definitely personal preference, though. I just much preferred having to flank & mug people rather than having a CS style head-on brawl with super accurate guns. Prone was badly implemented, but even that made the combat more varied. I personally loved it as a lot of people had prone-itis and would throw themselves to the ground at the slightest sign of trouble, leaving themselves screwed

There were more distinct, core gameplay elements than there are in BC2, so the way those basics could be combined was more varied and interesting.

Fun things to do in BF2:

• [*:2yguvuk2]Trying to shoot choppers down using a TOW missile launcher (hard to do, but humiliating for the chopper crew)
  [*:2yguvuk2]TOWing far away points using missile drop (always serious lolz when you TOW the tv station chopper from the hotel and kill 6 people who are waiting to get in it)
  [*:2yguvuk2]Hunting choppers using concealed vehicle mounted guns. A lot of folk complained about the vehicle dominance, but I took it as a challenge. I'd spend hours every week just ruining the lives of Sharqi chopper whores.
  [*:2yguvuk2]TVing jets using the chopper
  [*:2yguvuk2]Chopper battles that required good timing and deceptive dodging to avoid TVs
  [*:2yguvuk2]Soloing choppers with the machine gun & tvs
  [*:2yguvuk2]Speculatively strafing ground hotspots with jet machine guns
  [*:2yguvuk2]Learning to dodge missiles in the F-35B and watching J-10 whores wear a confused exp

ression (I was good at stratorunning, even if I was a pretty bad jet pilot overall)
[*:2yguvuk2]Being a sneaky bugger and taking the enemy airfield while all of the enemies are too busy waiting for the vehicles to spawn
[*:2yguvuk2]Flying a C4 watermelon (crap MEC/Chinese choppers) into a tank/chopper/jet/whatever... there were just loads and loads of ways to make your own fun.

I was still learning new skills in BF2 two and a half years after it came out -- that's the sort of longevity and nuanced gameplay I go for. I also agree that class consolidation sucks as it really muddies the waters. You can't look at someone and figure out how to work with them or beat them so readily. I much prefer it when the the class roles are more rigid, characters have recognisable silhouettes/uniforms and a limited range of weapons/kit per class. In BC2 it's more like generic solider has generic weapons.

Also, I really don't like the unlock system in BC2. First of all, you start with nothing and it takes time to get the most basic shit to even be able to contribute. No medpacks or shock paddles when playing medic until you unlock them? Really? However, once you're about 10 hours in, it's raining unlocks at a rate that you can't figure out which ones are good or bad because it takes ages to try them all out. Throw in the generic solider loadouts and it's just.. too much stuff with no clearly recognisable boundaries.

Shooters going down this route just add artificial complexity, in my opinion. All of the unlock permutations != complexity / longevity short of putting the hours in to unlock the next trinket. BF2 had little in the way of that bloat (just the odd unlockable gun), yet its gameplay was much more expansive, nuanced and varied. It had its flaws (medic revive trains, grenade spam, claymores, chopper/jet dominance) but it was still a much better game overall.

That was amazing. I have a particular hate for the blood-spattered screen in games these days

What redfigure + zyndrome said!

I hope it's arcadey like BF2 and not geared towards the 3 bullets-and-you're-dead-from-20-miles-away-with-blood-splatters-instead-of-health gameplay of BC2. BF2 was the buggiest game I've ever played, but very few games matched its replay value. Infantry? Fun. Tanks? Fun. Shooting down choppers using the TOW for humiliation factor? Fun. Flying choppers? Fun. Soloing choppers? Fun. Jets? Fun. Two man jet rape? FUN.

It was ace. BC2 felt small and too CSey for my tastes. Also: Fuck infantry only. If you want CS, go play CS!

Repton

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&

Elite

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... on the BBC micro. My mate had one; I had to wait a while to get my spectrum +3

Elite was something of a mind-boggling experience. Such a huge, complicated game on such a piddly storage format. I wasted hundreds of hours playing Elite II on the Amiga CD32 with the same friend.

Spectrum -> Megadrive -> Saturn -> PC

Purchased a load of cheap games in the Steam sale -- got some nice bargains there

Currently playing:

Super Meat Boy

Fun in short bursts, intermittently frustrating and satisfying, but mostly the latter It has a lot of charm. Trying to get an A+ on every level soon takes a toll, especially when using the keyboard instead of a game pad.

BF:BC2

I'm warming up to this now. I still think Dice made some mistakes, though. For example: The medic starts with no medpacks or shock paddles -- you have to unlock them and, when you don't know what the hell you're doing, it takes a while to get the points together. Until that point the medic has his wings clipped; it's a pretty weird decision. Overall I prefer BF2, but BF:BC2 started being a lot more fun once I'd got some unlocks (movement detectors + pump shotty = one shot ambush machine). My KDR has gone from something like 0.5 to 1+ in a few days because I've got some decent kit now. I'm not sure that's a good design decision; they should've dished out all of the basic kit from the start, imo.

The game itself is fast-paced, looks nice (even though I'm playing with everything on low because my machine can't handle it @ 1920 x 1200) and the audio is the best I've heard in any game to date. The only main dislike I have is that the weapons are so effective at all ranges, it means you do a lot of dying without knowing where you're being shot from. In older BF games, the weapons suffered from significant bullet travel & bullet drop timing, whereas I can pistol snipe in BF:BC2 without suffering much loss of accuracy. I guess I'm just a sucker for anything that makes it more of a CQB brawl...

Just Cause 2

Terrible acting, clunky UI and controls, but so much to blow up. I spent an hour just grappling the ground & gliding along a road with my parachute -- very cool. Will come back to this later I think.

Trials 2

Basically elastomania but not nearly as much fun (<3 elastomania). Has possibly the worst UI I've seen in forever, and if you ride your bike past the finish post (because it's not at all clear where the finish is most of the time), you'll wipe out and then have to redo the entire level. grnnnasighdsigh. It's ok for the money but I'm not that bothered about it.

Bully

Played a few hours of this and I think it's pretty good, though the minigames part of it is already starting to grate. I lol'ed when I humiliated a bully and my character grabbed the guy's hands and started punching the guy with his own fists, "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself!" The downside is that it uses an archaic save system and you have to remember to go to your dorm and save the game manually. Already lost about half an hour of play because I forgot to save Worth a look though!

Mafia = win

That's superb, hessi

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Squier P Bass . Got a Yamaha LL6 acoustic, a Fender Strat and this now, so I'm officially ready to form the world's shittest one man band.

Picked up super meat boy (9 million levels) for £3 and BC2 for £7 -- bargains all round

Nice job, fellows! 60% playing to the end is a nice figure to hear.

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Hopefully in the future they can give me a credit card gun, and I can just go around clicking on every single asset in the game and charge myself sums of money for my own ‘personalised’ ‘experience.’ And if this could be done in an exploitive way that fuels buying on impulse, jealousy and peer pressure then even better! In fact I’d like every game to forgo aesthetic sensibilities, consistency and possibly even its own art direction; in favour of a player brought mish-mash of gimmicky crap.

lollin'

Skjalg: what do you think of them? I'm tempted to buy one, but I've heard that the black depth is poor unless you set the contrast to 100% and them use a hardware calibrator. I can probably borrow a calibrator from work, but it's hassle

That's life, I guess :F

Quote from dux

Lmao. What ever happened to playtesters? Or competent ones at that.

Usually it's not down to playtesters being incompetent, it's down to scheduling & developer resources. It's always slightly terrifying to see how many bugs are waived as "won't fix" when a deadline is looming...

I doubt they can do the same with maps, as paid map content packs will split the community. At the very best, all they could do is bundle up a decent amount of maps (say 5) into one pack so that it guarantees pack owners will be able to play together. Even then, I can't see it happening.

I'm happy that Valve is redistributing the wealth (let's face it, a lot of people would contribute for buttons just to have their art in a great game), but I'm also slightly bemused at those amounts.

That's a good chunk of a year's salary for most employees. Moreover, amazingly talented artists populate triple A titles with reams of amazing content and (when you spread those payments out to a year) only see a fraction of that money. Unless valve has very generous profit-sharing schemes, those contributors will be making so much money that they'll outstrip most Valve employees. Also, as already mentioned, there's a huge disparity with the amounts paid to level designers. I'm guessing a contributing level designer will be paid a(n admittedly not paltry) one-off sum for their work, yet someone who contributes a hat and a gun makes a huge wad of cash?

I... brain... can't.... resolve this?! I guess all I'm saying is whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

Not having a pop at Valve, just ... struggling to make sense of this and what it means.